CARIDNAL GREETING –Francis Cardinal Spellman, a cardinal with the New York Diocese, is greeted by Ambassador Dempster McIntosh during a July 1955 visit to Montevideo, Uruguay.

Although life can take a Cape Codder far from these shores, some never forget the allure of the Cape.

In June 1964, your correspondent dined with one such man – Dempster McIntosh – whose life path took him from Cotuit to the far corners of the world, first, as a globe-trotting Philco Corp. industrialist, and then during the Eisenhower era as three-time U.S. Ambassador throughout South America.

Though his path took him far, he always retained his affection for Barnstable’s southwestern village.

That June evening, in his stately Darien, Conn. home, the retired diplomat (with his daughters, wife and brother listening) peppered me during dinner with questions about Cotuit.

Born in 1896, the young McIntosh, whose immigrant father toiled as head gardener of a large estate on Ocean View Avenue, enjoyed an idyllic Cotuit boyhood.

From 1903 to ’08, he and the sons of farmers and oystermen spent time in the play yard of the one-room schoolhouse and set traps for small animals.

He would have seen retired sea captains in and about Asa Bearse’s store, swapping yarns about voyages to distant places.

After finishing school at age 15, McIntosh entered international business, and rose over the years to the presidency of Philco International, before being appointed by President Dwight D. Eisenhower to three successive top diplomatic postings: Uruguay, Venezuela and finally Colombia.

McIntosh would return to the village in the summers of 1949 through 1952 with his father, wife and daughters, staying at the now-closed Pines Hotel.

During his postings, McIntosh had to grapple with weighty geopolitical issues, including maintenance of the crucial Venezuelan oil import flow to the U.S., and deal with issues as diverse as confronting a right-wing dictator in Venezuela and later, in Colombia, the leftist guerrilla insurgency soon to be known as the “F.A.R.C.”

But the accompanying photo shows one of the pleasant aspects of this diplomat’s work: greeting a traveling U.S. dignitary – Francis Cardinal Spellman, then cardinal of the New York diocese but with deep ties to Massachusetts – in Montevideo, Uruguay in July 1955.

A fly on the wall of the Montevideo embassy where the cardinal was hosted could well have heard McIntosh mention to the Bay State-raised cardinal his own boyhood in Cotuit.

McIntosh died in May 1984 in Palm Beach County, Fla. The boy who’d heard the old sea captains’ tales of foreign travel had himself traveled far, far around the bend of Cotuit Harbor, but the man remembered from whence he had come.

Copyright @2009 by Alfred C. Knight. The writer is a retired lawyer with a summer home in Cotuit who practiced international law. His father was the Cape’s former judge of probate.